11.12.2003

Some days it just doesn’t work.

Some days you’re happy and you know it and you clap those hands way up high over your head.
Clap clap, like flamenco dancers, in time and coordinated and quick and dramatic on the thighs and then you do that stomping bullfighting move

clap-a-clap-a-clap CLAP CLAP CLAP clap-a-clap-a-clap

Hah, you think, all firey and nostrils flaring and your smile feels ferocious, more like you’re baring your teeth than grinning.

But then some days you lift those hands above your head and all they touch is low ceiling and gray soft gauze like abandoned cobwebs and you lack the ambition to push that crap out of the way.
You just want to shrug and say tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll lift my hands.

I had bad dreams last night after a rather unfulfilling dance class and ensuing silliness at home with some dance friends who came to have wine and silliness. I found myself grinning like an idiot, unable to get into the emotions, and also not caring whether it happened. Not unhappy but not fulfilling, either. So instead I threw myself into the dancing that came after the laughter, focused on hard precise motions, muscle isolations, hips and shoulders strong, keep the heels in, knees flexed, hands the terminus of the energy. Maybe I couldn’t clap hands but I could feel alive, and wait for the dawn.

Today started out grey and cloudy, like a white veil was muffling all the brilliant vermilions and crimsons of the trees.

About an hour ago the sun burned it all away like sheer parchment, bright and shining and the sunlight and the heat makes halos around all the trees. I think I can lift these hands high, and I think there will be no sorrow, nothing quenching the fire in my soul, nothing that makes me think tomorrow will be better. Clap them together and revel in the sting of palms connected, the staccato beat, the pull in my arms short and sharp and a real smile tickling the corners of my mouth.

The sky is blue.